Many people who have survived major earthquakes notice the lack of concern among those who have not. Honn Kao, who now works for the Geological Survey of Canada, returned home to Taiwan, in 1999, two days after a massive magnitude-7.7 earthquake had ravaged the island. The quake killed 2,000 and left another 100,000 homeless. Taiwan’s power stations also were heavily damaged, and its nuclear reactors shut down automatically. For many, that led to the loss of water and electricity. Honn and his family had to walk down nine flights of stairs to collect two pails of water—and carry them back up—at least three times each day. “The impact goes far beyond just the number of fatalities and injuries. It’s all the lives of millions of people who all of a sudden have a change that they do not expect,” he says. “These are the kinds of things that you will not be able to imagine unless you actually live through it.”
That may explain why some of the best-prepared people have direct experience with disasters. Both Anne Mullens and Claire Kelly lived through big earthquakes in Japan before returning to Canada, though the earthquakes were more than forty years apart. Mullens was ten years old and staying with her family in Tokyo when the city shook in 1968. She remembers hearing a grinding noise like she’d never heard before, followed by a sudden, violent shaking. A goldfish bowl on top of the television jumped into the air “in a cartoon-like fashion” and smashed on the floor.
No one can pinpoint the exact date that he disappeared.
The 58-year-old always knew how to stand out from the crowd: bright red hair, a painted face, long shoes. In 2004, a small sample of children found him to be more recognisable than Founding Father George Washington and Jesus Christ, the son of God himself. But no one raised the alarm when he stopped appearing on British TV screens. No one wept when his cardboard cut-outs were shoved into the stockroom next to the spuds. When was the last time you sat on a bench with his cold plastic arm stretched stiff behind your back, a rictus grin frozen on his face? Ronald McDonald has been missing for seven years.
If the “Internet novel” or “Instagram novel” are ascendant genres in today’s literary marketplace, Tolstoy Together is an impressive nonfiction cousin. It sits merrily on the fence between a type of collective criticism and a commonplace book filled to bursting with clever ruminations and quotations. It also deftly strikes a balance between specificity and universality that Tolstoy, that preternatural truth-teller, would have approved of.